Jill DuffyAwards Guide: The Oscars (for iPhone)If you're on the hunt for an app you can consult the night of the Academy Awards, the free Awards Guide: The Oscars is a good one to nab. It lacks any visual pop and deep background information about movies and actors, but it does put lists of categories, nominees, and past winners at your fingertips.

If you're on the hunt for an app you can consult the night of the Academy Awards, the free Awards Guide: The Oscars is a good one to nab. It lacks any visual pop and deep background information about movies and actors, but it does put lists of categories, nominees, and past winners at your fingertips.

There's a lot to take in during Oscar season, from the red-carpet fashion to the backstage gossip. To see all the nominated films by the time the awards night actually rolls around seems impossible. If you're on the hunt for an app you can consult the night of the Academy Awards, something to help you keep track of the movies and people and songs nominated in all the different categories, Awards Guide: The Oscars (free; for iPhone) is a good one to nab. It lacks the visual pop and deep background information of the IMDb app, which I also recommend, but it does put lists of categories, nominees, and past winners at your fingertips.

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My favorite feature in the Awards Guide app is the ability to see how the community is leaning in its votes for the winner of each category. This section of the app hides beneath a statuette icon in the upper left corner of the screen. Tap it, and you can see the current year's categories, and one more tap brings you to its nominees, with a number indicating what percent of people think it will win.

You can choose your own winners, too, and the app saves them together on one page, which makes for handy consultation when it comes time to fill out your Oscar Ballot.

Unfortunately, for an app that's about the glitziest celebration in Hollywood, it lacks visuals. Little more than text appears over the app's skin of stage-set drapes in brown and gold. There are no photos of movie posters, or cast, or directors. You won't find any trailers for films, either, another reason to install IMDb ahead of Oscars night.

The database of nominees and winners in Awards Guide: The Oscars is thorough—I'll give it that. But the app lacks some love. The search function is split between movies and nominees, which seems unnecessary. Search needs to be dead simple to be effective, especially in apps. The app isn't even optimized for the length of the iPhone 5. But it's still effective for quickly checking the categories, nominees, and your pick for winners of the Academy Awards. Plus, it's easy to overlook the flaws in Awards Guide: The Oscars if you have IMDb at your side for all the missing details.

Awards Guide: The Oscars (for iPhone)

Bottom Line: If you're on the hunt for an app you can consult the night of the Academy Awards, the free Awards Guide: The Oscars is a good one to nab. It lacks any visual pop and deep background information about movies and actors, but it does put lists of categories, nominees, and past winners at your fingertips.

Jill Duffy is a contributing editor, specializing in productivity apps and software, as well as technologies for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on how to lead a better digital life. Her first book, Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life is available for Kindle, iPad, and other digital formats. She is also the creator and author of ProductivityReport.org.
Before joining PCMag.com, she was senior editor at the Association for Computing Machinery, a non-profit membership organization for...
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